[soneca]

I had an odd way to follow this advice. I am learning to code and in 4 months I went from no knowledge at all to learning basic CSS/Html to basic C# to basic MVC to be able to launch and start selling a useful enough SaaS to acquire a few paying customers. I am just not a good enough developer to automate everything, I can't even code properly without Visual Studio helping me.

I am not dangerous, but I now know enough to be useful. I am trying to make my customers happy. The first feature I added after launch was something my first paying customer asked.

My product helps senior citizens to control their medications (what, when and how many pills they must take, which days, and alert when they need to buy more pills). I will start to put handouts on drugstores. Better than hoping elderly internet users know their way through google ads.

I spent 3 hours watching the first prospect to ever use my product taking a look at it for the first time (that would be my father). I left with literally 50 notes of what I should do immediately and some more thoughts of future features.

I am not a hacker, but I guess this helped me thinking more about what people want, because there was not much I could do from my own ideas and knowledge.

[deepGem]

Speaking from personal experience, it's easier to pick up the traits of customer development/leadership/design with an engineering background. On the contrary, I've seen some of the smartest non engineer MBAs give up on programming. Not sure why.

[soneca]

I am not particularly smart, nor a MBA, or a McKinsey. I am learning to code to be useful, to build something useful, not build something great.

I would say that smart MBA try to learn to code to build something great, the next Dropbox, something that match their ambitions. When patio11 is your reference, not Bill Gates, or Zuckerberg, it is easier to keep your motivation. (Please, don't read this as me saying patio11 is not a great engineer, i couldnt know, just to illustrate the difference of ambition)